Hmm, well, if you read Jobs responses he was exaggerating, dramatic, and manipulative:

"he looked at the demo for 5 minutes and told me I had "ruined NeXTSTEP" (the software platform)" -> overly dramatic, exaggerating.

""Unless...", he paused with a twinkle in his eye, "there is a way of making it work like the old way,"" -> of course that way exists, but it requires working on saturday. He's not asking that directly though. Manipulative.

""This is 10 times, no 100 times, no 1000 times better!!!"" -> Overly dramatic, exaggerating.

It is telling that they had been preparing for this demo for 3 months and Jobs decided to come by two days before the demo, on a Saturday, only to trash the project and personally attack the developers.

It is quite the skill to be able to do that in a way that is motivational.

Imagine he decided to come by on Friday instead. Oh well, then we wouldn't have this story either.

EDIT: My bad I meant Thursday instead of Friday, so that it could've been fixed on a regular Friday.

Not sure I follow.

EDIT: So you think it speaks well of management to check up on a very important demo the last few days of a three months preparation? And make huge changes? That should have been known long in advance. Instead of a smoke-and-mirrors demo they could have produced the real thing had Jobs communicated what he wanted from the beginning or half-way through.

> So you think it speaks well of management to check up on a very important demo the last few days of a three months preparation?

Nope, I think that's terrible, but that's an easy judgement to make. Who knows what a stressful mess management was in.

My point is that its part of a facade (broadly called "reality distortion field"). I quoted 3 examples of clearly manipulative behaviour.

Jobs could've made it easier for the engineer by checking out on Thursday. Why didn't he? Perhaps he just had high expectations and was very much disappointed? Has he ever published memoires where he went into examples like these?

The demo for Steve was originally scheduled on a weekday the week previous, but kept getting rescheduled by Steve. Maybe it was a low priority for him and he thought he already knew what it was going to be. The preview only happened at all because we kept pushing for it, because we knew it had changed a lot and it would be very bad if he was seeing it for the first time live.

I know what to think, as I lived at the times before iPhone too. If nothing else, iPhone is an abolute proof of brilliancy of Jobs’ product decisions. So from the product/technical perspective, there was nothing comparable to be part of. But from a perspective of somebody not in his twenties anymore, I surely would’t continuously work under the described pressure. Everybody has to decide about his own limits and what is an acceptable amoumt of work.

The iPhone was just the first successful, always-on, capacitive touch device. The market was largely focussing on resistive touch devices which Jobs successfully identified was the wrong way (though the stylus did keep your screen clean!).

Exactly. Those little details, as insignificant as they seem, can magnify into an enormous difference in failure situations.

For instance, even after getting a hairline crack on my iPhone, I haven't bothered to replace the screen because I can use the device just fine, in most cases.

Contrast that with my 4yr-old Nexus 7[0] device which got a hairline crack about 1.5months ago, and the device is completely unusable, because of the design decision to use a resistive touch screen!

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00DVFLJKQ/

The Nexus 7 has a capacitive touchscreen, not resistive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_7_(2013)

Prior to the crack, the tablet responded to touch gestures differently than my iPhone -- I have to re-apply pressure for gestures to register sometimes. Also, I am unable to register tap gestures on the device with sweaty palms unlike on the iPhone, so I just assumed Asus used a resistive touch screen.

Anyway, the digitizer/touch screen build quality is brittle as plently of people have reported similar usage difficulty from hairline breakages [0].

Thanks for the correction though.

[0] https://forums.androidcentral.com/google-nexus-7-2013-rootin...